Games That Weren't^®

Possibly a bit of a shock for you now, as we take a look at a GTW entry for Mortal Kombat 2! Out of nowhere, an unofficial conversion of the sequel appeared, and a bloody good looking conversion too when you think of the tragedy of what was Street Fighter 2 on the C64.

Mortal Kombat 2’s C64 conversion was started by Hungarian crew Hermit Software back in 1998, and instead of just trying to do some wired ports of the digitized characters, the game features some properly pixeled graphics which work very well within the graphical limitations of the C64 – though of course with hi-res FLI and interlacing you would probably get as good as Mega Drive ;-)

Unfortunately, the game never got to a fully playable stage, but there is this demo which shows one of the characters moving around on a test level. Additionally there are many parts including the introduction sequence, title screens, character selection screens (functional) which all look very impressive indeed!

The project has been confirmed to have been scrapped and will never get completed it seems. We don’t believe that the game got any further than this, but it would be lovely if there was something more playable out there yet to be shown.

We are guessing that this conversion was done for pure fun, and it looks as if a lot of heart has been put into the conversion… as much as the Pinball Dreams conversion that was also abandoned. Well worth checking out to see a glimpse of how something like Mortal Kombat could be feasible on our humble breadbin.

Start of what could have been a mind blowing conversion, sadly never completed…

Another very early preview, Moppel is a simplistic side scroller
where you control some guy that I think is in a wheelchair and scrolls across a city landscape.

It’s quite simple, and apart from the scrolling and some little animations, it doesn’t do a great deal at the moment. It’s a bit buggy, and sadly you won’t get much enjoyment if you are expecting something to play.

We are guessing that there could be more to this game out there somewhere, but without any credit details, we have a bit of work to do. We know that the game was being developed in Germany, so maybe a German viewer will recognise this game?

Check it out for interest reasons, but there is a lot more to find out on this game, and hopefully more to hold out for…

Since the craze of Wolfenstein and Doom on the PC’s in the early 90’s, we saw a new breakthrough in gaming. Seeing this kind of game even on the likes of a SNES or an Amiga was pretty impressive to say the least.

A C64 version of Doom?… Surely not? Well, No Name thought it was possible and therefore made it possible. After seeing hints that a C64 could replicate a port of Doom through various scene demos, “Mood” sent shockwaves though the C64 community as the first “Playable” version of Doom, and a pretty good one at that! Well, ok… its slightly more Wolfenstein than Doom, but we can live with that. It’s a C64 afterall, and this is still impressive.

CMD surprising does not offer a helping hand for this game. With no Super CPU’s or Ramdrives needed for this game, just a standard C64 and a joystick. This is one of the most impressive things you may see on a C64. Ok, so the graphics are not as defined as the PC versions, but compensation had to be made for the fact that we are running on an 8-bit processor, and almost full screen too.

MOOD was developed on the Amiga using cross-assembling and painting levels in various paint packages on the system. Perff created some converter programs which the Amiga used to convert the pictures to datafiles that could be transferred to the C64 and run.

The game is just as playable as its counterparts, and just as fast, even more so when you play on a C128. Most of the weapons from Doom are present too, although it takes a bit of squinting to realise what some things are. Movement of enemies is not quite as fluid as the original Doom, but so what?…

The game comes as a set of previews which have been collected over the years, one with a set of sound effects added and better maps and weapons, with no speed loss. Rumours however of a C64 based level editor were rubbished recently and its been confirmed that the level creation was a complex thing that only the developers could really do programatically.

Unfortunatly, production ceased on this game after over 6 years in development. Currently the No Name webpages have screenshots of another much later version of MOOD, with improved colours and status bar. The weapons have also been vastly improved, and I am guessing that there is sound (even music) even more integrated into the game. Incredible… The Christmas level was confirmed by Perff as being done by another developer within No Name. There is a possibility we may see it at somepoint soon.

In addition to what we have added already, we’ve bunged a load more preview bits in the zip file for you to have a look at, sourced from CSDB and the No Name site. But also additionally, Glenn Rune Gallefoss has kindly submitted to GTW all his SFX work which was mostly unused. This can be downloaded from the link above.

Recently Perff, one of the game’s developers put a special preview out of some more of the later stages of the game, including the new score status panels and running much much faster! Does this mean we could see more?? Well, Perff has suggested there is always the possibility, but in reality what we have here as a whole is likely to be all there ever is. We hope that might change though!

However, it is a title that we may well continue to see little bits and pieces added to over the years, so we await any more bits and pieces of this wonderful Wolfenstein clone!

A classic PC game which almost managed to fully squeeze its way onto the C64 in its own little way…

Monster Museum was mentioned in March 1989 of The Games Machine as coming soon with the following blurb – “Other games on Palace’s mean menu include Monster Museum, an arcade adventure with graphics by Gary Carr and main programming by Andy Wilson (Dan Dare fame).” … Was this another result of Palace sinking and Titus not wanting to pick up and release?

When we did some research on the net, some Amstrad sites were found to have listed it, but it is missing for them too. So we had to keep digging, firstly by finding some of the Gang of Five such as Andy Wilson to find out more.

In early 2009, GTW were in touch with one of the Gang of Five, who suggested that they had a bunch of disks for Monster Museum, but wasn’t sure what was on them. GTW obtained the disks and backed these up, but were unable to release what we found until permission was granted from the original coder Andy Wilson.

Upon the disks we were surprised to find many different executable builds of the game from a year’s span from 1989 to 1990, and even more so to hear some long lost tunes by the late Richard Joseph. The game itself is ironically a mix of Barbarian 2 and Dan Dare, with a female lead role. Very exciting findings and something we were desperate to share with people, hence the screenshots we originally leaked!

Firstly in our hunt for the coder Andy Wilson, we located artist Gary Carr, who sadly didn’t know the whereabouts of Andy… but shed some light on the game’s development for us. After Barbarian 1 and 2, Palace changed direction slightly and started commissioning games from external teams. Monster Museum was a project that wasn’t fully fleshed out and didn’t come with much of a team, but Gary was asked to take on the project form an artistic point of view and worked with Andy on the game concepts.

The premise of the game was particularly different to most, as you play a female character in the game in a proper substantial role, some years pre-dating Tomb Raider. This was quite odd for 1989! However, things get very weird/co-incidental when we learn that the lead character is the daughter of a museum curator, is dressed in tight shorts, a vest top and has pony style hair!…. Very spooky, but Gary quickly adds this is completely co-incidental as the game never saw the light of day.

The story behind the game we learn is that you are locked in the museum over night and the exhibits come to life (Of which Gary mentions that there has ironically been a cheesy movie along those lines recently – Night in the Museum). The game world takes place over a number of exhibit spaces including: Egyptian, Prehistoric, Greek Mythology and Science (Being more like science fiction to make it more visually interesting). The game as a whole was broken into two parts and single load – the second part borrowing a lot in terms of displays from the first part it seems with different puzzles. Using various objects you must solve various puzzles.

Well, all good and everything… but we had to find Andy to be able to show you it in the flesh!… And that we did!…A few weeks later we got some developer leads and managed to trace Andy who was more than happy for us to release the game to the world!… He himself hadn’t seen it for about 20 years!

We learn from Andy that Monster Museum was the last game he ever worked on before leaving the games industry for good and going into a different profession. Monster Museum came about as a result of working with the likes of Simon Birrell (Known from their Virgin Software days). Simon helped Andy out with the design and odd ideas, whilst Steve Webb (ex of Virgin) was doing the Amstrad conversion (Hope you are noting this CPC readers!) and Patricia Mitchell (another ex-Virgin Software person) was responsible for the project management. Some of Simon’s ideas submitted can be found here, as well as a map produced of the game.

Andy recalls working closely with Gary on getting, what was considered at the time to be some great animations – including a Head biting plant and a Toilet Monster with some humorous features throughout.

One of the key findings with the game has to be the music by the late Richard Joseph – a number of short tunes and various sfx which have been great to find just a little bit short of the 2nd anniversary of his sad passing. It was quite haunting to hear the tunes for the first time as a result. Andy recalls Richard coming down to his place and playing him Herschell Gordon Lewis’ “Blood Feast” soundtrack (Which Simon Birrell had given him a cassette of) – this was as possible inspiration for the game’s tunes and sound effects.

The game itself was mostly complete – believed to just be around 5-10% away from completion – so we have had to give it preview status (But we’re sure that you should find this certainly playable!). The reason for its non-release?…. Well, the game remained unfinished after missing a couple of deadlines and Andy hit some serious technical problems – Andy hated multi-load games and was determined to fit it into 64K, which mean’t he couldn’t afford to continue development without further advances, and Palace were not in a position to pay anyone anything. Andy eventually parted ways with Palace and left the industry. Additionally contributing factors according to Gary were that the team were never really together to make it happen quickly enough (Space between office, coder, artist etc was quite far!). Simon Birrell took over the game to try and finish it off, but by 1990, Palace were subject of a takeover, the C64 was a dying platform in their eyes… and the eventual takeover company Titus decided to drop the title. And that was the end of Monster Museum.

So now we begin to conclude Monster Museum and what has been a great finding!…. It’s a wonderful look at the excellent talent of Andy Wilson that follows on from the excellent Dan Dare game and its a huge shame this didn’t get finished off. 6R6 has very kindly tidied up the game and fixed a few issues and added some extra keys such as 1 to skip screens and 2 to get different items. Along with the download we have included all the original disks that were backed up with the different builds and also the scanned disk labels – so its a bit of a download!

Case closed!